[marcus_holmes]

I took a career break and was weirded out by the question of "how do I introduce myself?". So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of <business>" that suddenly having nothing to say there was strange. When people asked "what do you do?" I had no good answer, and that felt like I had no good identity.

I guess for Sergey Brin it's a little different, he will always be "Founder of Google" even if he leaves Google.

But that "work as identity" may still be a problem. For a lot of us, what we do is who we are, and so not having any work to do is like not having an identity.

[burner420042]

You're describing my father. Now that he's retired his lack of hobbies is really catching up to him. His only hobby has been working and I've noted this about him since I was an adolescent and decided then as something I would not emulate.

A few times I've quit a FAANG job with no plan for after other than to wander, and both times the lack of professional competition meant not just coasting horizontally but that I was actually lowering myself somehow. Hard to explain, and I don't fully understand it.

I also noticed most people, especially women, determine your value by your 'right now'. While intentionally unemployed I'd answer truthfully and with a smile, 'I'm unemployed!' which visibly confused people.

[throwaway98797]

life is phase oriented

when i’m working i find retired people boring

when im taking 6+ month break i find the nervous energy of employed people annoying

ultimately, comfort comes from being around like minded people

then again seeking comfort rings hollow to me, even though it’s quite enjoyable in the moment.

[james_marks]

This is especially true around NYC, SF, LA. The culture is built around accomplishment and work identity.

Much less true in other places (e.g. Midwest), where community / taking care of others is valued.

[mrguyorama]

>While intentionally unemployed I'd answer truthfully and with a smile, 'I'm unemployed!' which visibly confused people.

The proper term is "Funemployed"

[cap11235]

"gainfully unemployed" is a fun one to use.

[RobRivera]

The people worth knowing were the ones enthusiastically socializing with me after uttering that phrase.

[weinzierl]

> So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of <business>" [..]

Risking a stereotype. In my experience from traveling the world it's a tell-tale sign for being from a culture heavily influenced by the Protestant work ethic. Introduce yourself like that in Spain, Italy, or Brazil and you'll get strange looks.

On the flip side, I've found that people who do not define themselves through their work primarily often do so through family. My younger self is certainly guilty of giving someone a strange look when within the first five minutes of meeting them, they told me whose cousin they were.

[throw101010]

In a business/formal context it would be normal to introduce yourself like this in the countries you've mentioned.

Do people introduce themselves like that in informal contexts in the USA? If so that's indeed a bit weird, and more a topic you would start talking about for small talk or if someone asked about it.

[endemic]

I would find it strange if someone introduced themselves to me with their business title. I sometimes ask "what do you do for a living?" as small talk, but that's solicited.

[ryandrake]

Even when it's solicited, I think it's weird. I don't tell people what I do for a living when I introduce myself. And when they ask, I tell them I'm an exotic dancer. It's a silly joke (since I'm a fat 50 year old) that tends to break the ice and lighten up the conversation. In general, I think small-talking about what you do for a living is not really interesting to people, and just allows them to silently put you somewhere on their mental totem pole of importance. Better to talk about actual interests.

[dpark]

> Better to talk about actual interests.

For many people, what they do for work is by far their biggest interest.

Many people have few to zero hobbies. They fill their days with work and then distraction.

[dopidopHN2]

Depends on where. In big city yes

[abraxas]

Americans don't usually have friends. Just "contacts". Working age "parties" are often just cloaked networking events.

[stuxnet79]

Not sure why this is being downvoted. It is very much true in my opinion, especially so for the big coastal metro areas.

[marcus_holmes]

Agree, it's definitely a cultural thing.

I've also lived on a small island where on first meeting, two locals will work out how they're related. I guess similar to the cousin thing.

In the city I currently live in, it's fairly normal for locals to ask where another local went to school within 5 mins of meeting them, because that establishes an identity here.

[Mc_Big_G]

Correct. If you said your title in Spain, you'll get a strange look and someone might respond with "why would you tell me that?". No one there cares what you do for work.

[yibg]

Not very common as the intro, but pretty common around here (bay area) to get asked that pretty soon after the intro. I don't like it, and I wished people didn't focus so much on it though.

[xfalcox]

First time I was in San Francisco and someone introduced themselves like that, going even beyond, was indeed a super weird experience being a brazilian.

[lucianbr]

What is the point of the "I'm Marcus" part of your introduction? Reading your post I get the impression it has zero value, or at least you think so.

> Hi, I'm Marcus

> What do you do Marcus

> I'm on a break now, but I used to be a director of IT

Is this really difficult? Seems really easy, and I was never a director of anything. Maybe that's the problem.

[jaapz]

For some people, their work/job is just such a big part of their identity, that for them this is a problem. That is I guess the point the person you were replying to was trying to make.

It's also not really weird for a job to become such a big part of your identity, when people spend most of their time at work or at home thinking about their work.

[phrotoma]

A couple years ago a friend of mine mentioned that he had known another mutual friend of ours for many years, much longer than I would have guessed. I asked him "what does he do?" and he thought for a moment before saying "you know ... I have no idea, it has never come up".

Definitely one of his more interesting qualities.

[foobarian]

I don't know if this is acceptable in the US, but I always found it distasteful when people ask about your job 30 seconds into meeting you. I think it's much more polite to talk about generic stuff until jobs or skills come up naturally. Sometimes, they just never do, and that's fine. Need to know!

[jasode]

>For some people, their work/job is just such a big part of their identity, that for them this is a problem.

That's only 1/2 of the dynamic. People also like to assign an identity to others.

For example, if I say, "I'm semi-retired." ... the follow-up question is always "Oh, so what did you do before that?" ... which is polite coded-speak for, "Did you inherit money or what work did you do for money that put you in the position to do that?"

People are naturally curious about your rough level of success, wealth, expertise, etc. Having a "no identity" stance isn't really a satisfactory answer for many listeners. They want to know more.

EDIT to replies: I do understand the harmless "small talk" aspect. I should've added more to re-emphasize the "people assigning identity" aspect.

Once I reply to the followup question with "Oh, I used to do consulting for finance" what then happens is others then introduce me as "And this is jasode -- he was a consultant for X". My ex-consultant life that I last did over 15 years ago is now part of a tagline/subheading associated with my name even though I never intended it.

The point is other people have this irresistible urge to "fill in the blank" with an identity -- especially an identity that is tied to how one earned money. I'm not complaining about this and it's just an observation of what humans naturally do.

[mr_mitm]

It's also a low risk topic that can generate lots of follow up questions. It's regular small talk. Also, people here seem to downplay it, but doesn't it tell you a lot about a person what they do roughly half of their waking time? What they chose to do with their life? Sure, you're not your job or your career, but it's also a very normal part about getting to know someone and I'm not sure equating it to some way of gauging success levels is necessarily to right way to think about it.

[jasode]

>It's regular small talk. Also, people here seem to downplay it, but doesn't it tell you a lot about a person what they do roughly half of their waking time? What they chose to do with their life?

Having a natural ebb & flow to conversation is all true but that's not the issue. Let me restate it differently.

It's ok and natural to ask what people do/did for work. It's also natural to respond and share what was a significant aspect of their life.

The meta-observation is: others then like to compress whatever life narrative they hear into a "shorthand" or "identity" -- even if the recipient never intended it to be his/her identity. Several parent comments mention "their work being their identity is the problem". My point is that the identity we get tagged with is often outside of our control and we didn't create the problem of work being our identity.

My neighbors know me as the "ex-consultant". For that identity to change, I'd have to do something new that was significant enough to override that ... such as... get into another career, open a restaurant, become founder of a startup, etc.

How does one have "no identity related to their job"? Sometimes you can't unless one wants to be evasive about what one does to earn money.

[dpark]

> My neighbors know me as the "ex-consultant" … How does one have "no identity related to their job"?

The obvious answer is to have some other identifier that supersedes the job. Do you have some other interest or hobby that you spend your time doing? That you talk about all the time?

People get associated with their job because it’s probably the thing they spend the most time on and it’s also a common topic of conversation. If every time someone asked you about your job you said, “it’s good” and steered the conversation into a story about your latest epic ski trip, you’d probably be the “guy who skis” instead of the “ex-consultant”.

[gen220]

Situations like this work as a filter of sorts (If you’re so obsessed with measuring relative status/prestige that you want to reduce me to a job title, we’re probably not going to be friends?).

The fact that you’re neighbors with these people changes things. Maybe it’s a wedge into a Socratic discussion about how work isn’t and has never been your identity, where you come to some new and better mutual understanding.

But yeah it’s challenging. If people are so accustomed to viewing about themselves and others thru the conventional status/hierarchical lens… sometimes they can’t understand that it’s a lens and not reality.

[pixl97]

>It's also a low risk topic

In modern life, yes. I wonder if it was such a low risk topic as we moved towards the past? For example the fear of the stranger is something that is very common in past writing across a number of cultures. If you met a stranger and they said they were a soldier it would have different ramifications than if they said they were a baker. Also in smaller social groups that required the work of everyone to survive it was a way of measuring the resources available in said group.

[inglor_cz]

It is not just about assigning identity to others.

I am probing for topics of mutual interest, or topics that make other people passionate, to learn more about them generally.

In some people, this is completely orthogonal to their careers, but most of the time, there is an overlap. Like, I haven't yet met a railway engineer who wasn't a raging railway nerd at the same time.

[yibg]

> People are naturally curious about your rough level of success, wealth, expertise, etc.

I definitely find this more true in some cultures. e.g. silicon valley, it seems people want to know where you're at on the "hierarchy". Many parts of Asia too, you get treated differently if you're a low level worker, regular worker, executive etc.

[marcus_holmes]

Well, the "I'm Marcus" part is saying "I would like you to call me Marcus" I guess.

You're right, it is easy to say. But there's an identity and professional pride and all sorts of stuff wrapped up in the job title that isn't so easy to let go of.

It also leads on to questions like "and what are you doing now?" which get to "I'm lazing around doing nothing because my mental health took a hammering while I was IT Director", and so on. It's all so much easier and tidier with the job title.

[lucianbr]

Sounds really sad. I am not a director of anything, I probably make almost nothing compared to you, and yet I know who I am outside of my job. I have friends who value who I am, regardless of my job or even between jobs. I would not trade places with you for all the money in the world. I would not have any use for all that money then.

[singleshot_]

It's like when people say their pronouns, but for nouns.

[dmitrygr]

> When people asked "what do you do?"

I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often. In CA people ask that so they can mentally rank you as worth their time or not. Elsewhere, people ask you how your weekend went, or how your family is. One of the awesome parts of moving to Austin was not hearing that as the first question as much.

[alexjplant]

> I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often.

I moved to California a few years ago from the Least Coast (insert shaka, surfer, wave emojis here) and had multiple other out-of-towners in the same situation as me say the exact opposite at a party. They all were adamant that they had yet to hear "what do you do [for a living]?" since they'd moved as they did ad nauseum when they lived on the other side of the country.

I've not noticed either way. My pet theory is that people hear this frequently if their social and professional lives bleed into each other which they do if one lives in a town dominated by a specific industry or profession. Those moving westward during COVID and remote work suddenly had to contend with this much less.

[zippyman55]

Never hear that question either. I don’t ask it either. I’ve actually been pretty successful but asking that question seems to rank someone on a scale that does not reflect their amazing contributions to society.

[alexjplant]

I ask because a) I'm interested in the same way that a child is in what people's jobs are and b) it gives me a frame of reference for interacting with them conversationally vis a vis common ground.

Wealth signaling still seems to me to be done primarily by conspicuous consumption and expensive hobbies.

[Klonoar]

It’s so commonly asked in DC that it’s been a meme in dating circles there for decades.

[mckn1ght]

I’ve found asking “what do you like to do” vs “what do you do” to produce much more interesting conversation.

[stavros]

I really don't like getting asked what I do for a living. I exchange labour for money somewhere out of necessity, what's at all interesting about that? What I do in my free time is who I am, and that's much more interesting to talk about, to me.

[oefrha]

I don’t like getting asked what I do for hobbies. The real answer I want to give is “none of your business”, but I’m polite enough to never say that, so it gets awkward.

Getting asked what I do for a living is totally fine. It’s on my website, the whole world can find out if they bother to search. I’ll save you a search.

The point is people are different. Not everyone wants to share their private interests with you, especially if you just met. What you consider interesting conversation, well, for some of us it’s just intrusive. I also don’t care what you like to do 99% of the time. I’ve been socially forced to sit through way too many of these “interesting conversations”.

[mckn1ght]

Could we be thinking about different social situations? I’m not turning to people on the bus and asking what their hobbies are. And it’s not my first question of people visiting my office happy hour.

If you’re at my home for dinner, I hope anyone that still feels this way does answer “the details of my private life are none of your business” when I’m trying to get to know them as a friend, so I know never to waste another good meal on them.

[dirkc]

I sometimes joke and say that I type for a living, not entirely untrue. But I've found that sometimes people are offended if I answer their question evasively

[dopidopHN2]

I work in a buttons factory

[dirkc]

sometime I say "push buttons for a living" instead of typing :)

Can also describe my job as 'endlessly deliberate over the placement of pixels'

[pastorhudson]

I always ask “What do you do for fun?”

[scottyah]

Same! I love the pregnant pause after "What do you do..." as they start to mentally draw up their usual work spiel before adding the "...for fun" to flip the conversation around and actually get their brain thinking and exploring beyond the standard conversation flows.

[scotty79]

> When people asked "what do you do?"

"I mostly breathe. It's a bore but you gotta do it"

"I meant for a living"

"Same"

[blitzar]

"waste management"

[throw101010]

I'd say we moreso produce waste than manage it as humans. We seem actually pretty bad at managing it unfortunately.

[2muchcoffeeman]

Who were you before you got a job? No one? Nothing?

I identify more with myself as a child than I ever did with my work.

Why would I identify with someone else’s goals that I’m being paid to help achieve?

[scottyah]

If you ever get to talk to people who are more than laborers trading time for dollars, it is great fun. When dollars are just one of the many rewards from their career (where a person spends like 80% of their life energy), you get to hear a lot of passion, learning and growth. It really is a whole different way to live.

[jonfromsf]

After a decade, "founder of X that I no longer work at" is considered a lame answer. People want to know what you are doing now, not your highest claim to status of your entire life.

[rwmj]

Make up a name, print some business cards, and be a "director" (or whatever title you like) of your own Potemkin company.

[QuercusMax]

When I lived in the bay area for a few years, everybody would tell you where they worked, and if you didn't tell them, they'd ask. Since moving to Portland, I've definitely noticed that people are much more interested in what you do during your leisure time.

[intended]

Hoo boy, this is definitely a weird one to navigate, especially if you have a weird set of roles. It takes time to settle various threads and figure out how to address this.

[triceratops]

> "what do you do?"

"Whatever I feel like"

[blitzar]

> So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of <business>"

Tech bros would mock Finance bros who would open a conversation with anyone who would listen with "Hi, I'm Marcus, I work at Goldman Sachs" and yet here we are now ...

"Hi, I'm Marcus, I work at Google"